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Human Enhancement and the Question of Human Beings

This article deals with the understanding of human beings in the project of human enhancement. It shows that, in the voices of some representatives of the latter, there is a naturalistic tendency to reduce human beings either to their environment or to virtual reality. In such cases, the resulting entity would lack interiority as well as the first-person perspective. In this paper, it is argued that the possibilities opened up by biomedical sciences cannot release us from employing a multi-dimensional and integral concept of human beings wherein interiority plays an important role. The human enhancement project is not only a matter of technical feasibility; it also fundamentally concerns the essence of humanness. Hence the question of the nature of human beings and their condition is an indispensable part of this enterprise.